Karen M. Rice

I SIT AND WONDER

I sit here tonight on the colonnaded balcony of an old inn that has stood rock solid on the banks of the Ohio for one hundred ninety eight years, yielding little to wind, rain and fire. The moon is a just past the full, not quite yet three-quarters waning. It creeps up the sky amidst bridal illusion clouds that hold no promise of rain. It casts a silvery sheen between black, tree lined banks, making a shimmery, silken path for fairy lights to drift along. Two tugs pushing barges pass like sluggish behemoths in the night, one struggling northward toward Pittsburg, the other going perhaps to join the Mississippi and push its load to Memphis or even New Orleans.

I sit and wonder how many billions of cubic feet of water have flowed past this old edifice in almost two hundred years, how many in the thousands of years since the glaciers began to melt. How many humans and other creatures have floated past these tree cloaked shores? How many people have stood on this old deck and watched the river flow past and with it time? Did they change its course or it theirs? One can only sit and wonder.